Archive for the ‘Service Pack’ Category

The team at Microsoft have released Service Pack 2 for SQL Server 2008. The big enhancement from this SP for me is Reporting Services integration with SharePoint 2010.

The link to the Service pack is here. As always, test any new service packs before promoting to a production environment – and have fun.

The list of new features are as follows (directly from the Service Pack page)

15K partitioning Improvement. Introduced support for a maximum of 15,000 partitions in tables and indexes in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 2 in the Enterprise, Developer and Evaluation Editions. For details on how this support can be enabled and disabled, along with recommended operation paramaters, see the white paper Support for 15000 Partitions.

SQL Server 2008 Instance Management.With SP2 applied, an instance of the SQL Server 2008 Database Engine can be enrolled with a SQL Server 2008 R2 Utility Control Point as a managed instance of SQL Server. For more information, seeOverview of SQL Server Utility in SQL Server 2008 R2 Books Online.

Data-tier Application (DAC) Support.Instances of the SQL Server 2008 Database Engine support all DAC operations delivered in SQL Server 2008 R2 after SP2 has been applied. You can deploy, upgrade, register, extract, and delete DACs. SP2 does not upgrade the SQL Server 2008 client tools to support DACs. You must use the SQL Server 2008 R2 client tools, such as SQL Server Management Studio, to perform DAC operations. A data-tier application is an entity that contains all of the database objects and instance objects used by an application. A DAC provides a single unit for authoring, deploying, and managing the data-tier objects. For more information, see Designing and Implementing Data-tier Applications.